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as social sciences go linguistics deserves way more recognition than it gets those guys have been consistently ahead of everyone on reassembling prehistory purely on the strength of linguistic relations W after W although identifying the Caucasus was probably peak glory
if your not familiar the process was roughly (1) oh shit all these languages seem to be related, from english to russian to hittite to latin to sanskrit, maybe sharing a common ancestor (2) lets reassemble the ancestor language deductively and THAT worked, so then,
(3) ok what words for local flora and fauna did the ancestral language have and what part of the world do those things live in (4) ok i guess its between the black and caspian seas and like a century later bio catches up and confirms this a century!
its possibly hard to imagine how disorienting this must have been for the english toffs colonizing india and discovering sanskrit. the antiquity enthusiasts who discovered sumeria were awed by the alien /old/ old world, but Jones' vision was one of unity across time and nations
admittedly he got a bit carried away https://t.co/bsqalj0ZQA
this all came up because i was curious about context re use of "desi" and discovered the existence of a sanskrit term "paradesa" referring to a foreign land and hey that seems like a plausible cognate no? turns out maybe not although hard to say for sure https://t.co/DRYwjN6jvb
paradise = walled garden, place of abundance. also refers to Eden, also refers to Heaven paradesa = foreign country, a place not our home incidentally this uncomfortable relationship closely parallels eutopia (the good place) and utopia (not-a-place) https://t.co/023zzOI0vv